If you've worked with ASP.NET MVC (or similar stack) web applications, you've likely noticed that it's very common to see some sort of sidebar widget with supplemental information. If you've got a page and want to display some handy summary information, like statistics for the site, doing so is basically the easiest thing in the world. We're going to walk through the different pieces in a sample setup of this which I've used in this very blog to get the site stats widget you see over there to the right.

In my data travels there are a couple SQL functions which have come in so singularly handily that I've decided to dedicate a blog post to them. Those functions are RANK and DENSE_RANK. In this post I'm going to talk about one particular class of use cases where these functions can come to the rescue.

Last time we looked at creating a simple scorecard in Excel to visualize info, data, & metrics for some entity of interest, such as a customer, potential customer, employee, etc. In that article, the underlying data lived in another Excel workbook (customers.xlsx) and we used a direct data connection in the scorecard template (scorecard_template.xlsx) to easily pull the data. This time we're going about the same goal through different means. The data will be in the same place, but we're going to handle getting the data and populating it in a copy of the scorecard template via a Windows Forms application in C# using OleDbConnection and ExcelInterop.

If you've ever wanted a quick & dirty way to visualize metrics & status info about something, there's a good chance you can get part of the way there without a fancy BI tool or a ton of time. Excel's visualization & conditional formatting tools, used in conjunction with references to data on another sheet, can easily product a scorecard like the one discussed here.

It's all in the title - a ranking of 10 breads!

Everyone loaves bread! These crumbly sandwich handles have been making us more full than we want to be before the main course arrives for billions of years. And what a variety of bread we have in the world today! With thousands of bread varieties being invented in bread labs every day across the world, it's become harder than ever to keep track of all of them and the order in which we prefer them.

It is with this challenge in mind that I bring you this bread list - a ranking of 10 breads, by an actual bread person!